The Stars in Medieval Eyes

The modern model of the physical universe helps us to understand outer space. The medieval model helps us to understand ourselves.

In the book Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, a philosophically minded physician named Thomas Cowan recounts the story of a lecture he attended while in medical school. The context at this point in the book is a discussion of how our health is affected not only by the world around us but also by our perception of that world. The lecture, given by an educator who had studied both astronomy and physics, began with these words:

The single most important concept that you must deeply understand if you are to know, really know, anything about the stars, or planets, or yourself, is ... that the Earth is still and the sun, planets, and stars rotate around us.

This occurred in the twentieth century. The speaker had no intention of denying the heliocentric astronomical model that we all learn in school. Rather, he was honoring the geocentric model as a cultural and psychological reality that emerges from our raw experience and poetic observations of the physical universe. To banish or ridicule classical geocentrism, with its vast revolving orbs and enchanting geometrical elegance, is to create a stress fracture in the structure of the human person: the cosmos as we naturally perceive it, we are told, is an illusion. The sun doesn’t actually rise, the moon doesn’t glow with its own light, the stars are scattered through unfathomable expanses of space, and the earth is not the center of anything. In short, what our senses and our feelings tell us about one of the most fundamental and awe-inspiring dimensions of human existence—namely, the earth and the heavens—is wrong.

For modern folks, this rupture between sensory experience and intellectual knowledge—that is, between body and mind—is unavoidable. Astronomical discoveries cannot be un-discovered, and few people would want them to be. Furthermore, perhaps this mind–body fracture can, if we acknowledge it and seek to heal it, make us stronger: instead of assuming that the geocentric model is a physical reality, as Europeans did long before the Middle Ages, we can consciously place it in harmony with the work of modern science. We can commit ourselves to the belief that both empirical science and traditional cosmology teach us the wonders of the universe, but rather like prose and poetry, one speaks more to our intellects, and the other more to our hearts.

Nevertheless, the modern astronomical mentality can be difficult to overcome, and there are times when it seems that the medieval understanding of the cosmos was a shorter and easier path to personal wholeness.

Medieval culture inherited its geocentric cosmology from ancient Greece, and primarily from Aristotle. Its key features are as follows: